Recovery With Data Deduplication

Recovering data following full system failure is a time sensitive issue. In order to get a business up and running again, needed programs and data need to be reinstalled to backup systems so business can continue. Data deduplication can be an important part of this process. The way a company saves their data is only as important as how recoverable that data is. That is why data deduplication can be an important part of the recovery process.

When people think of data deduplication, they usually think of the way the data is saved. They think about storage space and maintaining a system backup for when the worst happens. However, most of these people don’t think of how that data is going to come out following the recovery process. This is actually a bit ironic, because the only thing that matters in data deduplication is how the data is restored. If the data is backed up, but flawed or unusable, then the entire backup process was wasted.

In the event of disaster recovery, data that has gone through the deduplication process will be downloaded into the new system. This process might take a bit longer, because the data has to rebuild itself. Simple disc-to-server recovery will go faster because the data has been saved in its original form. In data that has been deduplicated, the system will need to hunt down data that has been moved into one small file.

However, this data is just as good as the original data. Depending on how much data is being recovered the increased time might be minor or it might be sign cant. In instances of smaller amounts of data, this time period may not even be noticeable, with only a few seconds to minutes of difference. If the data is larger, then the data reconstruction could take days longer.

When dealing with whether or not this will be an issue, the company must take into account the possibility of loss of opportunity. They can either store large amounts of data or reduce their space while increasing their storage costs, for an event that may never happen. Or, they might need to consider the fact that their systems will be offline for a longer period following recovery. For most companies, this amount of time might be negligible when considering the extensive costs of backing up the entire system over and over again.

These options need to be weighed carefully. When deciding whether or not to use data deduplication, the company will need to consider their resources and the personal they have available. If they forgo data deduplication, then they will need more personal and a large amount of storage space. This could be a large expense for most companies. The recovery process might be a bit longer, but in most cases, the extra time it takes to restore deduplicated data is worth saving the money on storage and resources. This is especially important for companies that might never face the loss of their data.

For most companies, data deduplication is the best choice for managing data in the event of a disaster. The data is small enough to be manageable, but completely useable when the system needs to be restored.